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Nov. 18 — Almost from Day One, two-weeks of UN climate talks that rolled into the early morning
hours of Nov. 19 in Morocco had President-elect Donald Trump’s fingerprints all over
them.

The Marrakech summit opened on the eve of the U.S. elections, with negotiators from
nearly 200 nations arriving with one eye focused on the contest between Trump—who
warned he’d “cancel” the 2015 Paris climate pact—and Democrat Hillary Clinton—whose
election would maintain U.S. climate action.

In the end, the summit closed with nearly 200 nations renewing the vow they made in
Paris last year to work together to confront climate change, even as the world’s second
largest emitter, the U.S., appeared poised to withdraw from the historic Paris Agreement.

But the main focus at the UN talks always was to make headway on implementing the
Paris Agreement, which entered into force just days before the Nov. 7 start of the
negotiations. It calls for keeping global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, compared to pre-industrial levels;
and to “pursue efforts”
to hold the line at a 1.5 degree Celsius increase (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

By the Morocco talks’
end, the impact of Trump’s Nov. 8 victory, which could spell U.S. withdrawal from
the global pact but also a rollback of the Obama administration’s domestic climate
policies and international climate funding, was clear.

A Declaration With More Bite

In response to Trump, the nearly 200 nations worked for days on a largely political
declaration to reaffirm that they won’t walk away from the international effort or
the domestic actions they’ve pledged to address climate change.

“I think it would have been a very different document had the U.S. election not happened,
I think it might have been a softer characterization” in the countries’ declaration
otherwise, the lead U.S. negotiator, Jonathan Pershing, told Bloomberg BNA Nov. 18.

“So I think the election elevated the profile” of the declaration, which “was made
more explicit in response to the U.S. election,” the U.S. special envoy for climate
change said. “There are 195 countries that are here that all bought into that and
the way it was adopted. Well there wasn’t even a discussion, everyone stood up and
applauded for two minutes,” he said.

“That was a clear sense of the commitment” developed and developing nations sensed
was needed, Pershing said, “and I think it was in part a response to the United States”
election and its implications for the Paris global climate deal.

A Longer, More Substantive Rebuke?

Unveiled Nov. 17 in its final form, the
Marrakech Action Proclamation was by most accounts a more forceful and lengthier rebuke to Trump’s threat to international
climate cooperation than what the countries had in mind before the election, and before
the summit, formally known as the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change.

The declaration warns that the world “is warming at an alarming and unprecedented
rate and we have an urgent duty to respond.” It also urged the world to move “forward
purposefully to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to foster adaptation efforts.”

The document also calls for “the highest political commitment to combat climate change,”
another phrase interpreted as a plea to Trump to leave the Paris deal untouched.

More than 365 companies and investors, including more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies,
said in a statement timed for release at the Morocco summit that they’re still backing
the Paris pact. The companies also called for staying on track with the global transition
toward low-carbon and clean energy development.

Also at the Morocco summit, negotiators issued a roadmap—one perhaps more vague than
many climate advocates wanted—the first steps toward transparency and reporting procedures
for the Paris pact. They also drafted a rough outline of a 2018 review that will determine
what more nations need to do to curb global temperature rise.

“This was the commitment we needed to see by all the parties, to have the rulebook
by and large completed by 2018,” Mariana Panuncio-Feldman, the head of WWF’s delegation
monitoring the talks, told Bloomberg BNA Nov. 18.

Coalescing Around a Clear Message

The Obama administration’s outgoing climate negotiator—who to some degree was hamstrung
in the Morocco talks given Obama’s lame duck status and the looming uncertainty posed
by Trump’s election—acknowledged that the Republican’s election upended the summit.

The prospect that the U.S. might be about to withdraw from international climate efforts
after eight years of re-engagement under Obama was palpable, Pershing said.

That wasn’t evident so much in the roadmap to implement the deal, he acknowledged,
which “moved forward as we would have anticipated, with or without the election.”

But “the bigger thing that happened is that people kind of coalesced around a clear
and quite forceful statement of what comes next, and their intent to stay in this
process independent of what the United States was doing [and] it was manifest in this
thing called the Moroccan proclamation,”
Pershing said.

The nearly 200 nations opted for the standalone proclamation “to speak explicitly
to each other and to the world about their intent to follow up—and it reaffirmed Paris”
as well as the commitments to the domestic pledges nations put on the table ahead
of the December Paris talks, he said.

“And it reaffirmed the urgency of the problem, and the science, so it’s basically
a very political statement of intent,” the U.S. negotiator said.

Election Wild Card

“Obviously the wild card for here was the election,” Alden Meyer, who tracks the negotiations
as the Union of Concerned Scientists’ director of strategy and policy, told Bloomberg
BNA.

“How do I judge outcomes here? Well, given the political shock of last Wednesday”
when negotiators heard the U.S. election results, “it’s a home run,” Meyer said.

Minister after minister including Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Marrakech
this week to warn against backtracking, as mayors, states, and business organizations
pledged continued support for solar and wind energy and nations unveiled plans to
decarbonize by 2050, Meyer noted.

“It was almost like they were reacting to, and I’m not kidding here, an alien invasion,”
Meyer said. “People were saying, ‘No way, we have to protect planet earth,’” he said.

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, a former Peruvian environment minister who oversaw the 2014 UN
climate summit in Lima, told Bloomberg BNA expectations were modest going into the
summit, and negotiators met those expectations. It will take time, he said, to assess
whether nations made enough progress here in Morocco toward implementing a deal that
is supposed to live on for decades.

“This COP [Conference of the Parties] meeting should not be analyzed in a sort of
black or white view, but by how much we are moving forward” to confront climate change,
Pulgar-Vidal said, ahead of the next UN climate summit, which is slated to be held
in late 2017 in Bonn, Germany.

“On one hand, we saw here at this COP a lot of support” for the 2015 Paris deal, “but
I would hope that the next one will be more focused on raising ambition,”
the former Peruvian minister said. “And we are not there yet.”

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